A teenage burglar with more than 660 crimes on his record smiled as he was jailed today after making a mockery of a community penalty scheme.

Bradley Wernham, 19, was condemned by a judge for thieving at a rate that affected crime statistics when he moved towns, and involved an estimated £1,100,000 worth of goods stolen since he turned eleven.

But he was also told that his contempt for a non-custodial "last chance" scheme, before his final arrest this year, would not discredit the system of night-time curfews coupled with unpaid community work.

Judge Christopher Ball QC praised Essex police for standing by the alternative to jail, and told Chelmsford crown court: "There are more ways of making life safer for the public than just locking people up. There is real scope for these aspects of rehabilitation to take place in the community and occasionally, in cases such as this, the risk of failure is justified. It was a unique case.

"The fact that it has not been successful in that Mr Wernham has chosen to reoffend must not discourage the police from continuing to employ the scheme and this approach to selected offenders."

The court heard that Wernham was tracked by police when he moved in January from Harlow to Chelmsford, where a rise in thefts coincided with his arrival. He was caught trying to break into a house with a BMW M4 car parked in its drive – the suspected target of the raid.

His arrest came only three months after Judge Ball had agreed to sentence him to the community penalty scheme after a hearing in which Wernham admitted 17 burglaries and asked for another 300 committed over eight years to be taken into consideration, along with 350 other crimes. The order was the first to be made in Essex and the judge admitted that it had been a "gamble on a prolific and successful burglar whose criminality had left no home or workplace safe".

Judge Ball told today's hearing: "The sentence I then passed was a considered and deliberate risk in the hope that, given encouraging signs, such a course would indeed break Mr Wernham out of his cycle of offending." Discussions had suggested that the teenager wanted to make a fresh start by coming clean over all his crimes, most of which would never have been the subject of successful prosecutions.

"The risk that I took obviously has not ultimately resulted in the desired effect," said the judge, telling Wernham that he had let himself down by an immature love of "the buzz and adrenalin rush of pitting your wits against the police".

The judge said that future use of the community penalty scheme should take more account of an offender's maturity, but not attempt to eliminate all risk. He said: "The younger and more immature the offender, the less likely they are to take up the opportunity. That opportunity must never be taken away just because one case has failed."

Wernham, who admitted attempted burglary, was jailed for four-and-a-half years for the original 17 offences, and a further six months for the reoffending. He will have the 376 days already served in custody for all the crimes taken off his term in jail.